FLINT, Michigan — Nestled along the Red Sea coast in Saudi Arabia, a multibillion dollar university is breaking a long-held tradition — as the only campus in the strict Islamic country where men and women attend college together.

And among the start-up team that helped launch Saudi Arabia’s first co-ed college is a former Flint resident.

Kettering University alum Terry Van Ballegooijen recently took a break from retirement to help new students transition into life at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology — a prestigious postgraduate university that opened in September with some opposition and a flood of international fanfare.

“There has been some public comment against men and women going to school together. It’s a big transition,” said Van Ballegooijen, 62, who attended Kettering from 1965-1970. “There’s a notion that since men and women don’t mix in social settings, why would they study together? It’s tradition.”

At least one head cleric was asked to step down after opposing the sprawling university’s co-ed status in the male-dominated, fundamentalist Islamic society, Van Ballegooijen said.

Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca and Medinah — the two holiest places in Islam — has been dubbed the most religiously strict country in the Middle East with total segregation of the sexes and that bans women from driving.

But KAUST has made international headlines and even stirred controversy between conservatives and modernizers in the kingdom for confronting taboos — women will not be required to wear veils, may mix freely with men and be allowed to drive on the 14-square-mile campus in a seaside community just an hour north of Mecca.

Back in Flint, Van Ballegooijen’s role in the facility has put him in the spotlight of alumni news at his alma mater formerly known as the General Motors Institute and in the media in Oregon where he and his wife Kathleen live.

“I don’t know what they’re eventually going to achieve over there but I think it’s going to be spectacular,” he said of KAUST. “It could lead to a design that would make solar panels affordable, a vaccine that solves some problem in humans or a plant that can grow in more saline soil.

“It’s exciting stuff to be a part of, not something a retired person out in Oregon usually comes across.”

The campus of more than 800 students representing more than 60 different countries opened in Western Saudi Arabia on the eastern shore of the Red Sea at Thuwal — a decades-long dream of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud.

King Abdullah has called the university “a beacon of tolerance,” hoping it becomes a global scientific hub that inspires new scientific achievement.

Saudi Arabia has poured billions of dollars into the university that is gleaning international attention for its world-class research facilities, top world scholars and one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

And for nearly a year and half, as the groundbreaking waterfront campus prepared to open, Van Ballegooijen worked behind the scenes as KAUST Inc.’s Western Hemisphere Director of Logistics.

He describes his job as a “people mover,” helping students, faculty and staff smoothly get to and settle into the Saudi Arabia university — from arranging visas and passports to the moment they stepped foot on campus.

Van Ballegooijen was tapped for the job because of connections to the university’s administrators from spending more than 20 years in Saudi Arabia where he worked as an industrial engineer for Saudi state-owned oil company Aramco.

It’s not a country he ever imagined living in.

He still remembers the phone call he made all those years ago in response to a help wanted ad with a picture of a pipeline.

“I thought I was going to work on the Alaskan pipeline. That’s what was going on at the time,” he said, recalling the recruiter’s question after offering to fly him to Texas for an interview, “He said, ‘Oh, by the way, you don’t mind working in Saudi Arabia, do you?’

“Then I had to get out a map to find out where that was.”

Life in the largest country of the Arabian Peninsula in the oil-rich Gulf region was not without culture shock for the Illinois native, whose family is of Dutch heritage. There were the traffic rules that at one time automatically penalized drivers who struck camels in the road.

It meant sending his two sons John and David — who later also attended Kettering — to boarding school in the United States because the American school system there ended in ninth grade.

And there was war. His family carried gas masks, designated safe rooms at home and heard missiles outside.

In 1999, the family settled into a much quieter life in the quaint little beach town of Florence, Ore.

But Van Ballegooijen couldn’t stay away for long.

When he had an opportunity to help with groundwork for the brand new university 50 miles north of the commercial center of Jeddah and that was unlike anything else seen in the Middle East, he couldn’t say no.

He started the job in October 2007 and said he mostly worked out of Washington D.C., sometimes during odd shifts to accommodate Saudi Arabia’s eight hour time difference and Saturday to Wednesday work week.

He said his role is wrapping up and he’s heading back to Oregon soon.

“We believe in the fundamental core belief that people are (entitled) to democracy, to liberty and to fundamental issues as they relate to equality. This kind of development in Saudi is certainly encouraging,” Kettering Provost Michael Harris said.

“It shows the power of education.”

“We are very, very proud,” Harris added of Van Ballegooijen’s work. “The reason we try to provide students with the tools and education they need to be successful is because they will go out in the world and make it a better place. We’re glad to see it stretching all the way to Saudi and beyond.”